Wireless sensor networks (WSN) have been used today in various applications such as tracking safety of the residential buildings, vehicle tracking, wildlife tracking and environmental surveillance etc. Thus, wireless sensor networks are gaining worldwide popularity and have been deployed in various environments including offices, homes and hostile areas.
Privacy is an important issue in today's context of extreme penetration of Internet and mobile technologies. Recently, large-scale data collection and integration efforts have increased privacy concerns. In the wireless sensor network, during data aggregation, the server node or data aggregator node may be able to find the private content of the data of the individual sensor node responsible for collecting tracking data in the particular area. Further, wireless links may be eavesdropped by attackers to reveal private data.
Thus, during data aggregation, the preservation of privacy of data at the sensor nodes needs to be ensured so that each sensor node's data should be known to itself. The task of the server node should be restricted only to perform data aggregation operation and execute further processing on the aggregated data only and to avoid it to reveal private content of the data at the sensor nodes. Further, the eavesdropping of wireless links by attackers should be avoided.
There have been efforts made in the past for preserving private data of the sensor nodes while aggregating the data in the wireless sensor network. Some of the prior arts know to us are as follows: